Apparently, September 9 has sneaked up on me again.
Exactly two years ago, on September 9, 2024, I pressed the button and launched Kekbur.net. Last year I nearly forgot the first anniversary because I was buried under Gamescom coverage. This year?
Well… I’m buried under Gamescom coverage again. Some traditions establish themselves surprisingly quickly. The funny part is that while the situation looks almost identical from my desk — too many interviews to process, too many photos, too many games I want to write about and nowhere near enough hours in a day — the site itself feels very different.
Kekbur.net started as a personal project. A place where I could write about games I actually play, preserve some of the things I had learned over many years in gaming, and occasionally sit down with developers and ask the questions I genuinely wanted answered. Two years later, I’m still doing exactly that. There’s just considerably more of it now.
I Stopped Chasing Google
Perhaps the biggest change this year had nothing to do with a new interview, event, traffic milestone, or shiny project. I stopped chasing Google.
For a long time, it was very easy to get caught in the numbers. Search rankings, impressions, clicks, keywords, SEO scores — all those little graphs that constantly tell you whether something is supposedly “working.” You publish an article and immediately start wondering where it ranks, whether the title is optimized enough, whether Google likes it, whether you should have written about something more popular instead. At some point I sat down and asked myself a very simple question:
Why am I actually doing this?
To get good SEO rankings? Nope. I started Kekbur.net because I wanted to share things. My passion, my knowledge, strange discoveries from games I have spent thousands of hours playing, conversations with developers, useful guides, screenshots, stories, and some completely unnecessary experiments that seemed like a good idea at the time. Most importantly, I like the thought that something I make might help somebody.
Maybe someone discovers a game because of an interview. Maybe an indie developer finds something useful in another studio’s explanation of how they solved a problem. Maybe an EVE player finds an old story they thought was forgotten. Maybe a guide saves someone an hour of frustration. That warm feeling is worth considerably more to me than watching a line move upward in Google Search Console. Especially on the bad days. I’m not going to start naming articles “Some Thoughts About That Thing I Played Last Tuesday.” SEO has its purpose. But it is no longer the reason I decide what deserves my time.
I would rather write something useful for 20 people than something empty for 100,000.
A Different Kind of EVE Fanfest
I sadly missed EVE Fanfest in person this year, which hurt a little. Reykjavík and Harpa have become very special places for me over the years, and watching everything happen from home definitely wasn’t the same. Still, a small piece of my work made it there without me.
Earlier this year I created an EVE Online trailer, and Fenris Creations used it as Fanfest 2026 opener. Seeing something I made playing on the huge screen inside Harpa was surreal. I might not have physically made it to Fanfest this year, but my pixels did. The trailer also scored almost 190k views, a huge number for my tiny channel.
EVE Forever
More importantly, another EVE project finally moved from “idea that has been living in my head” into something real. This year I launched EVEForever.org, a project created to help preserve the stories and memories of EVE Online capsuleers who are no longer with us.
EVE has existed for more than two decades now. For many of us, it isn’t simply a game we occasionally log into. Friendships formed there have lasted for years. Corporations became communities. Players met partners, traveled across countries to meet each other, fought ridiculous wars together, argued on comms at 3 AM, and built memories that extend far beyond New Eden.
And, inevitably, over twenty-three years, we have lost people along the way. I wanted there to be somewhere their stories could remain. EVE Forever is still a small project, but it represents exactly the reason I reminded myself why I do all this in the first place. It isn’t something designed around popularity. It exists because I believe those stories deserve to be preserved.
If it helps even one family, friend, corporation, or old fleetmate keep someone’s memory alive, then it has already done its job.
A Difficult Summer
Not everything this year went according to plan. During the summer my activity dropped significantly after I suffered a severe injury and temporarily lost the use of one hand. Unsurprisingly, writing articles, editing videos, handling cameras, and generally operating the ridiculous collection of equipment around my desk becomes considerably harder when one of your hands decides to stop participating.
Later, I also had to shift more of my attention toward my day job. I need to put additional money aside for surgery to properly fix the hand, and sometimes real life gets to move itself to the top of the priority list whether you like it or not. That meant fewer articles, fewer videos, and several ideas sitting unfinished much longer than I wanted. But hey, I’m still here.
And I genuinely want to thank everyone who supported me during that period — whether through messages, comments, sharing my work, checking in on me, or simply continuing to read the site while things were quieter. I noticed it, and it meant a lot.
Gamescom Still Happened
Despite everything, I managed to make it to both Gamescom Dev and Gamescom 2026.
And I still haven’t learned moderation 😀 I came home with more than 20 interviews.
My Gamescom trips have gradually transformed from “let’s see some cool games” into something suspiciously close to a logistical operation. Meetings stacked across several halls, developers from tiny indie teams and major studios, hands-on demos, photographs, recordings, notes, and enough material to keep me editing for months. But this is also where Kekbur.net feels most alive to me.
I love returning to developers I met the year before and seeing how their games have changed. I love meeting a small team working on something weird and ambitious. I love asking questions that don’t fit neatly into a press release and getting an answer that suddenly explains why a mechanic exists the way it does. And now I’m slowly turning that mountain of recordings into articles.
The YouTube Experiment Continues
The YouTube side of Kekbur has also grown much more than I expected.
A year ago the channel was sitting at 100 subscribers. Today it has reached 369. For YouTube standards that might still be a tiny channel, but from where I’m sitting, that’s 269 more people who decided that my strange content was worth keeping an eye on.
Thank you.
I would really love to reach 1,000 subscribers before February, which would take the channel past one of the big milestones toward monetization before Google raise that bar to 8000! So I’ll allow myself one shameless anniversary request: if you enjoy what I’m doing and haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing it here.
https://www.youtube.com/@kekbur_net
Every subscription helps, but honestly, so does every view, comment, like, repost, and message. When you operate a small independent site, those things aren’t abstract engagement statistics. You recognize names. You notice people coming back. Sometimes someone leaves a thoughtful comment on an article I’ve spent two days writing, and suddenly those two days feel completely justified.
To everyone who has stayed around during these two years: thank you. You guys mean a lot to me.
Kekbur Has a Second Editor
And finally, perhaps the biggest upgrade Kekbur.net received during its second year: There are now two of us.
My dear wife has officially joined the site as its second editor. We’re both passionate gamers — in fact, we originally met through a game, which is a story for another day — and gaming has remained a big part of our family ever since. She’s already been dragged into interviews, Gamescom demos, co-op sessions, photography, discussions about article drafts, and situations where I say something like, “Can you quickly check whether this paragraph makes sense?” and then appear again twenty minutes later with another one. So making that involvement slightly more official feels appropriate.
Kekbur.net is still a tiny personal site. There isn’t a giant editorial office hiding somewhere behind the WordPress login. There are no investors, marketing departments, or mysterious sales people discussing quarterly content strategies. It’s basically us, our games and silly ideas. And I think I like it that way. Two years ago I launched this site because I wanted somewhere to share the things I cared about. During the second year, I think I finally stopped worrying quite so much about how large it could become and started appreciating what it already is.
People read it.
People come back.
That’s enough reason to keep going. So, happy second birthday, Kekbur.net. Now I’m going back to those 20+ Gamescom interviews before the third anniversary arrives and I discover I’m still editing them.
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